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The Girl With All The Gifts Wikia
__NOEDITSECTION__ Welcome to The Girl With All The Gifts Wiki The Girl With All The Gifts is a novel written by M. R. Carey, published in 2014 by Orbit Books. This book follows a very special little girl called Melanie as she travels through what's left of the world in search of acceptance. The wiki tells you all about her journey. Synopsis Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant Parks keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don't like her. She jokes that she won't bite. But they don't laugh. Plot In the future, most of humanity has been infected by a variation of a fungus known as the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. The infected, referred to as "hungries", quickly lose their mental powers and feed on the flesh of healthy humans. The disease spreads through blood and spit, but can also spread through spores created by the fungus, which needs an unknown trigger to be opened. The few surviving members of the human race either live in heavily-guarded areas (such as the Beacon) or else roam in packs living off the land. The latter are called junkers. The Beacon sets up a military base, called Hotel Echo, for the study of a specific group of hungries. What sets them apart is that these hungries, unlike others, are able to retain their mental powers and only lose control when they get too close to human scent. The men in the base, led by Sergeant Ed Parks, find these hungries (who are children) and bring them to the base, where they are educated by a number of teachers and tested by the head scientist, Caroline Caldwell. This often means she has to kill the children, something with which Helen Justineau, a teacher at the base, is uncomfortable. One day, Caldwell decides that it is time to dissect Melanie, a 10-year-old hungry at the base with a genius-level IQ. Just as she is about to do so, Justineau interrupts and tries to save her. At that moment, however, the base is attacked by a group of junkers and hungries, forcing the three to stick together. As they escape, they find Sergeant Parks and his subordinate, Private Kieran Gallagher, as well. The five decide to travel to Beacon, which is a considerable distance away, but argue on whether to bring Melanie or not. They decide to take her along after placing a muzzle on her. As the group walk, they come across the Rosalind Franklin Lab. The lab, commissioned when the epidemic was in its early stages, was a mobile lab with state-of-art facilities for both experimentation and attack. The lab is deserted, and the five enter it. Caldwell, whose health is deteriorating due to an infection, experiments with the limited samples available. During their stay, Melanie comes across a group of child hungries. Melanie sees that they, too, retain their mental functions, although they have no language of their own, being uneducated. Afraid that they will be experimented on, Melanie instead tells the adults at the lab she saw a large group of junkers, but she later reveals the truth to Justineau. But Gallagher, scared by the news, sets off from the lab. He is found by the intelligent hungries and killed. Meanwhile, Caldwell gets anxious about her experiments and realises she has little time left to live. In the absence of the others, she drives the lab away into hiding. She also captures one of the intelligent hungries and experiments on him, making some remarkable findings. Meanwhile, Justineau and Parks find the lab with Melanie's help, but Caldwell does not let them inside. Melanie explores her surroundings where she finds a giant mass of fungus spores. Melanie tricks Caldwell into letting her inside. Caldwell realises she is dying and, in her last moments, tells her findings to Melanie. Intelligent hungries are second-generation ones, meaning their parents were hungries when they were conceived. Those born in this way retain their mental abilities. With this said, Caldwell dies. Outside the lab, Parks and Justineau are cornered by hungries. Melanie calls them off, but is too late to save Parks. In his last conscious minutes, she asks him to shoot the mass of spores with a flamethrower, deducing correctly that the environmental trigger to open the spores is fire. Since the spores are numerous, it will likely infect the remaining healthy humans as well. Melanie foresees that as long as there are healthy humans, the war between them and the hungries will continue, meaning that for second-generation hungries to be born and rebuild the world, every one must first be infected. Parks agrees to this and asks her to shoot him, preferring this is to living as a hungry, which she agrees to. Some time later, Justineau regains consciousness and sees Melanie there. She leads her to a group of intelligent hungries, to whom Justineau, fully protected, starts teaching the alphabet. Featured Media Blogs Social Media Discussions Category:Browse